Liist

I just sold a monthly subscription to Liist.io by cold emailing someone.

I found Dan's post about CasterKit on IH late one night. As someone on the cusp of launching my own podcast, I checked it out and realized this was the perfect use case for Liist.

I cold emailed Dan that night explaining what Liist is and linked to a few examples. Before hitting send, I took 20 minutes to whip up a mockup based on the logo and added it as an attachment. Dan would later say "your email was almost the perfect sales email".

Check out the site at https://casterkit.com

The site for Liist's first paying customer has launched. The traffic coming in is impressive but that's what happens when you already have an audience (Facebook group with 130k members).

All of the sites I've launched so far have been manual. I'm glad I did it this way because I'm seeing pieces that are common to all sites and what sort of things need to be customized.

I'm working on the admin interface now.

https://www.amazingeducationalresources.com/

A friend of mine who knew of Liist pinged me to ask if I could help them get a site up quickly. Domm Holland had started a Twitter thread to get exposure for startups who were raising capital during the pandemic. I told her to collect the data in a Google spreadsheet and I would start working on the site.

After 2 long nights, we launched https://raisingduringcovid.liist.io

Startups are listed in a card format. There's a 1-line pitch along with their industry, funding round, and location.

The biggest pain was sourcing the images so I definitely want to write a tool that automates that for myself. It's also been a challenge for We Are All Teachers Now.

The person maintaining the giant Google spreadsheet of teacher resources is now Liist's first paying customer!

I reached out and they had tried to get a website built a few times and failed. The list of features they want fits my idea for what a paid plan would look like. I don't have pricing figured out yet but I threw out $50/month and he agreed.

I am seeing list-based sites and Google spreadsheets all over the place. One, in particular, is a massive Google spreadsheet for educational resources for teachers. What if I could make it super simple to turn that spreadsheet into a searchable and filterable website?

The sites could be built with Gatsby.js (React). They would be super fast, almost entirely static so performance is 🔥. I'd have some basic templates to choose from at first and plan to add templates regularly. The data would live in a Google spreadsheet and I'd have a simple admin interface where users could customize their site.

There would be a free plan that limited the number of sites you could publish and would host the website at a subdomain with a "Made with Liist" badge somewhere on the site.

At this point, I'm pretty excited so I just did what most of us do when struck by an idea. I bought a domain. Liist.io.

I'm going to reach out to the person responsible for the large Google spreadsheet of teacher resources to see if they'd be interested...

My wife and I had been struggling to find resources for our 4 kids. Lists had been making their way around social media with resources and activities but it was impossible to see what age and subject the resources were for and which were actually good.

So I built a website to list free educational resources. It's a highly curated list. Nothing makes it on the site without being vetted. It allows parents to filter by grade and category.

https://weareallteachersnow.com/